Monthly Archives: July 2009

Update: Andrew Sullivan, back in Sept of last year, noted a contemporary polling result…

A new poll released Thursday (Sept. 11) finds that nearly six in 10 white Southern evangelicals believe torture is justified, but their views can shift when they consider the Christian principle of the golden rule.
The poll, commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, found that 57 percent of respondents said torture can be often or sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists. Thirty-eight percent said it was never or rarely justified.

Christ’s message of empathy is clearly no longer operational. Get the revelation here

Update 2: Matt Yglesias makes a wonderful observation on the graph above and on Mike Weigel’s further breakdown showing that this southern phenomenon is due almost entirely to white folks…

“I think Republicans have basically given up on the battle of trying to win more Hispanics over to their side. Which leaves them with the medium-term objective of trying to get non-southern whites to act more like southern whites.”

Armey, Texas Republican and former House Majority Leader is now a big-time and very wealthy lobbyist at the hire of large corporate interests such as Exxon Mobile and he heads up the conservative activist Freedom Works front group (fronting those same corporate interests and the RNC). He’s a rather nasty piece of business. As the linked Think Progress piece notes, in recent testimony on Capitol Hill, Armey said the following:

Let me say I take it as an article of faith if the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth, and he made them to his satisfaction and it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation.

He might believe this idiotic formulation but there’s no reason at all to suspect he does. Lying is not at all unusual for the fellow. We’ll note that he doesn’t explain here how this omnipotent and good-intentioned God missed halting a few other unpleasant events like the murder of six million jews.

As “Cabaret” gives us a necessary peak into the sordid corners of 1930s Berlin, the National Review is a necessary complement to our understanding of the more vulgar aspects of modern American political culture.

Let’s take today’s contribution there from Andrew McCarthy. We’ll start with this wonderful bit mid-way through the piece…

The mission ofNational Reviewhas always included keeping the Right honest…

We ought to be thankful, no? Then, let’s head back up to the very first sentence of the piece…

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Barack Hussein Obama claimed it was a “smear” to refer to him as “Barack Hussein Obama.”

Links/citations to this multitude of instances unfortunately aren’t provided by McCarthy. A possible reason they aren’t is because he’s lying.

Reading Ha’aretz this morning, I noted this news item. I’ve been a fan of the fellow since high school (before he made the music scene with Suzanne) and have seen him perform twice, the most recent time three months ago in Vancouver (yes, it was incredibly wonderful).

But I’d never considered how he might be received by an Israeli audience, given the plethora of Christian allusions throughout his work. Will he play this audience differently? I’d love to be there and see.

Hostility to the concept [of same sex marriage] was widespread and blatant. In 1971, when Michael Wetherbee of the Minnesota ACLU argued that a gay couple had the right to marry under that state’s constitution, one judge on the Minnesota Supreme Court actually turned his chair around and refused to face Wetherbee as he delivered his argument. Not a single judge asked a question. The court’s unanimous decision denying the claim cited the book of Genesis to support its conclusion that marriage is properly limited to the union of a man and a woman.